SOCHI, RUSSIA—The XXII Winter Olympics
were at once one of the hardest Olympics NBC’s
team has done, and one of the smoothest.

The well-documented construction and other
delays made the run up to the Feb. 7 start difficult,
a situation softened by building extra time
into the schedule, getting through customs
a little earlier, and so on.

“It was really hard getting to Opening
Ceremony,” said David Mazza, senior vice
president and chief technology officer at NBC Sports Group and
NBC Olympics. “But from Opening Ceremony
onward, it’s probably been one of
the smoother games.”

Mazza said that once the competitions
began, everybody just started doing what
they normally do. “That’s where you saw
the professionalism in the veterans shine,”
he said. “Once they had the right tools in
the right place, you turn the lights down
and go on the air, they’re doing their jobs.”

Sochi, more than any other Olympic
host city, was built from the ground up,
added Mazza: “There’s never been an Olympics
that was built so much from zero…
the Russians got it done.”

THE RIGHT TOOL, THE RIGHT PLACE
Having the right people in the right place
is more than half of the equation. In Sochi,
more than ever before, NBC Olympics also
had the right tool in place. The broadcaster’s
media asset management workflow—developed
across six Olympics as technologies
and compatibilities came online—went
mainstream.

Sochi was the eighth stop in NBC’s 11th
consecutive Olympic Games road show (the
network has secured the broadcast rights to
the Olympics up to and including 2020), and
it was a major milestone in the network’s
decade-plus march toward true file-based
production, shared across sites. For the first
time, users at key venues, the International
Broadcast Center,
or based in the United
States, could all “remote”
the broadcaster’s archive
that resides within the
new NBC Sports facility
in Stamford, Conn.

In Sochi, NBC’s commitment
to, and confidence
in its MAM system
reached a level where the
traditional “record wall”
of tape or optical disc machines
in a sector of the
IBC that had been called
“Central Videotape” for
decades, was abandoned.
Although the recording
format has not changed
since Vancouver, the record devices are now
eight 4-channel Harmonic MediaDecks.

Called simply “the MAM” by most, the
system constitutes the central part of a collaborative
production workflow involving
best-of-breed servers from EVS, Avid, and
Harmonic, coupled with crucial software
and hardware from smaller vendors.

Most editing duties were handled by 45
Avid Media Composer edit seats, aided by
Avid ISIS storage and Interplay. File-based
movement was handled by NBC’s Avid
media asset management system, ingesting
video from 40 channels of Harmonic
MediaDecks, plus 300 TB MediaGrid storage
pools located in Sochi and Stamford. All
truck replays and live playback video were
recorded using more than 60 EVS XT2 and
(mostly) XT3 HD video servers.

John Biggins, a DP for NBC Olympics, at one of the Alpine events.

The workflow and design was very similar
to the one NBC deployed in London in
2012, but venue connectivity took a big
step forward in Sochi. “For the first time, our
production staff are not only pushing [EVS]
IP Director database EDLs and clips to the
MAM, they’re also pushing to key venues,”
said Darryl Jefferson, vice president of Digital
Workflow for NBC Olympics.

Sochi saw NBC taking a leap of faith. “For
the past year we’re operating this way in
Stamford, and we realized it was possible
to run this way for the Olympics as well,”
said Matt Green, senior digital media engineer
for NBC Sports Group and NBC Olympics.
“In London we left ourselves a safety
net by building off Sony’s XDCAM [optical
disc] stations. If we lost automation,
if we lost asset management, if we
lost central storage, we could put
everything on optical discs as we
had done in Vancouver and Beijing.”

Although the entire system continues
to be based on Sony’s Long-GOP 50 recording format, not having
handheld media in a production
process can be a hurdle for some users.
But as adoption rates exceeded
expectations, the benefits became
obvious to end users, according to
Jefferson. “The thing that’s remarkable
to us as stewards and watchers
of the project is that as soon as
people can access the entire library,
there’s really no way to put that genie
back in the bottle,” he said.

“Even though we turned the MAM on
to the broadcast clients for the first time in
London, this is the first time it reached out
to enough places that you really saw the impact
on the organization,” Mazza said. “The
venues, New York City, Florida, Telemundo...
they were all connected. So I would say this
is really where the MAM sort of went mainstream,
front and center.”

SPLIT PRODUCTION AND MORE
Pushing the MAM to key venues was a
big difference from London to Sochi. Another
key difference was the heavy use of
the NBC Sports facility in Stamford, which
became operational several months after
the London Olympics, but a full year before
Sochi.

Although the facility houses numerous
NBC Sports divisions, it was designed with
Olympics in mind. A substantial part of the
facility can switch back and forth between
50 and 60 Hz reference and three of the control
rooms and two-thirds of the EVS rooms
and the edit systems in Stamford were running
at 50 Hz. Conversion to 60 Hz was generally
done at the very end of production.

“That saved us a lot of conversion,” Mazza said. “For example, curling has six or seven
feeds going from Sochi to the curling
control room in Stamford at 50 Hz, and it
had two converters on its output, and as a
backup. So that saved five converters, just
in that one instance.”

It also helped out during the Opening
and Closing Ceremonies, in which 30 Rock
(not set up for 50 Hz) took a backup feed
that had passed through Stamford for conversion.

Stamford is very well connected to both
the NOC in New Jersey, and 30 Rock. “It’s
now a place where we can send our own
material and do things to it, and then send
it off to another NBC entity,” said Mazza.
“We’ve kind of ‘normalized’ it in Stamford.”

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